I believe that if you want to fight the effects of AI, the most effective steps you can take are (1) disconnect from the internet as much as possible and (2) distill useful human knowledge, tools and processes to something that a small group of humans can understand and modify. Don't let the greatest tools suffer complexity rot into oblivion.
I've been living this moto for three years now. I am writing this text using my own vim-like editor, which was built by my own build system, rendered to html from a documentation language I designed. Everything is built from scratch using lua, something the project will eventually also build from scratch.
Working a corporate job had enough drudgery to begin with, but the last year it has become more necessary than ever to have a place of accomplishment which is simple and fun. This must be what artisan carpenters felt when they were forced to work the line of a factory - the pure joy of creation for it's own sake becomes stale when applied to updating huge software stacks where your contributions are barely a noticeable spec, but reviewing (and re-reviewing, and re-reviewing) an AI performing those same tasks is even worse. Having a project where I can directly use my skill on distinctly human tools is a breath of fresh air that has kept me sane and happy.
If you feel like me, I highly recommend thinking about how your tools and craft can be distilled so that other people can pick them up, use them and eventually modify them. Keep them distinctly human. Even before AI, us software developers loved to add complexity to solve problem like scale, "performance", and things the "user" would need. Build like you are the only user and most complexity will melt away. Write your tools to be fast for O(H), where H is human use only. The editor I write in is pure-lua and yet has zero latency despite asynchronously syntax highlighting the file. I've designed it to be able to load and edit million line files using only KiB of added memory. Sometimes problems seem harder than they really are.
This blog is the first I plan to write on this site (https://civboot.github.io). I'd love you to discuss in the civboot mailing list and of course you are welcome to contribute or report bugs to https://github.com/civboot/civstack.
This is the end of the pre-alpha era for Civstack, onwards to a full-featured and actually useful tech stack for Civilization.
- Rett